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Sourdough Ensaimadas without Commercial Yeast

October 6, 2011 - 7:02am

PhOven

Sourdough Ensaimadas without Commercial Yeast

I'm still a sourdough novice but a restrict sourdough purist. :-) Of course, I usually add baking soda and powder to sourdough cookie batter or cake batter that can save old sourdough starter. However, I try not to add yeast when I bake 'bread' using sourdough.

It was a great experience for me to get to know this web community and see marvelous sourdough bread that home bakers worked so hard. Most bread did not look like a standard of that amateurs could bake: they've really set a high standard for a newcomer like me. Their bread has been a great inspiration to me for last 8 months and I learned a lot from this community. But one thing that I've eagerly wanted to know was whether sourdough was good source enough to make enriched bread. I could find some enriched bread made out of sourdough but adding yeast to it, not the amount of a pinch but as the same as to usual yeast bread. I thought it did not give me an edge in culturing my starter if wild yeasts were useless to expand enriched dough. That is why zolablue's posting about sourdough challah was so meaningful for me. It was hillarious to see her beautiful bread based on the recipe by Maggie Glezer.

As a beginner, I tried to bake many bread that had different ratio of sourdough starter, butter, or eggs to flour. Finally, tada~~~~~ I'm so much proud of myself though you may not agree with me. My recipe is sourdough ensaimadas without sour taste at all. Just like yeast-added enriched bread, they are tender and buttery. I truely love the sour taste of sourdough bread but I need to satisfy my people who are not familiar with it(you can figure out that my English is not that of natives!). So I have had to be obssessed with the taste as well as the crumb. To be honest, I prefer healthy sourdough bread, love its sourness and rarely bake enriched bread. Sometimes, it is worth enjoying sweet and rich bread for breakfast when it gets cold outside...

1. Mix preferment and all ingredients for final dough and knead till it is smooth.2. Bulk fermentation for 2 hours. It may not expand double but that's fine.3. Divide into 10 pieces of dough and roll out like a rectangle. Brush the melted butter on the surface, roll up and coil the dough like snails. 4. Proof them on the baking sheet for 3-4 hours untill it is doubled. 5. Preheat the oven to 350 degree and brush the egg wash to each piece of snail-shaped dough when it's ready. 6. Bake them for 20 minutes.

Your ensaimadas are very beautiful and I am sure they taste like heaven, but they don't look like ensaimadas from Alicante and Balear Islands (their homeland). The original ensaimadas aren't glossy, they are flaky, because the dough is a classical layered dough, but the layering is made not with butter, but with white refined pork fat (actually the name of ensaimada in Catalan came from the Catalan work "pork fat"). The dough is very rich (lots of eggs, lot of fat, lots of sugar) and they let him to fermet all the night, some 8-10 hours. You can find good videos about ensaimadas on Youtube in Spanish or Catalan, but even if you cannnot understand what they are saying, you could watch the way they usually do them.

A few years ago when I heard about ensaimadas, I found a video from YouTube where they knead and shaped fantastic ensaimadas. I remember they baked a huge size of ensaimadas... it was very interesting and I enjoyed that show. But I got to know they used pork fat for traditional ensaimads a few weeks ago. About eggs, sugar... you're absolutely right. Maybe they will be more flaky if I add more fat but they were flaky enough to peel the layers only with brushing melted butter on the dough. I used 20% of butter to flour (enriched bread contains more than 20% of fat). Of course, they are not glossy any more when egg wash is skipped. Most ensaimadas recipes that I found use butter fat instead of pork... maybe the original one has went through some changes since it arrived here, I guess.

If you wanted to see a traditional ensaimadas, I'm so sorry. :) But I bet you can find more beautiful ensaimadas faithful to the original rule, expanded by commercial yeasts. My intention was to try if sourdough starter could work well with enriched bread when more fat and eggs than usual in sourdough bread would be added. In addition, too rich bread doesn't agree with me because I have allergy against much intake of fat. I think less fat and eggs are also good for health. I hope you are not upset because my version is not faithful to tradition. :)

I decided to comment your ensaimadas, because I have some experience with authentic ensaimadas: I lived half of my life in Spain and part of my family is from Alicante, ensaimada's native zone. Now I live in Belgium, but I still spend many time every year in Spain and part of my this time, in Alicante.

I was interested in ensaimadas some years ago, so I went asking people from small artisan bakeries about their ensaimadas. Bakers were usually very nice, flatered, I think, by my interest, and shared willingly their recipes. Nonetheless, those recipes were not classical baker formulae, because they were based in the amount of liquid (milk, eggs) and the usual advice was to add the flour in order to achieve a "right consistency" of dough. I wanted to see the "right dough" and they showed it to me in several bakeries. In all the cases they used a "raw ensaimada", a piece of paté fermenté from the previous batch of ensaimadas, as a leaving agent.

I tried to bake ensaimadas several times at home (in Spanish summer I am unable to enter a room with a functioning oven, it is too hot). My ensaimadas were good (and small, because you can find them of different sizes), but not good enough. I felt that there were something missing, something different from the Alicante's ensaimadas. Maybe, my ensaimadas tasted differently, because they were made with different flour or different water.

Speaking about sourdough starter and brioche dough, I am with you: they work very well together. I bake many Italian brioches (from Torta delle rose to Colomba), and the classical recipes claims always for a sourdough starter. I've made an Italian sourdough starter and never had any problems even with a very rich dough.

Today was the perfect day for me to bake these. I had a bit of extra leaven which turned out to be just enough. I much prefer baking with sd too and now I know I can make a really enriched dough without any IY.....just patience while they rise. They turned out great and so easy to do :-) My teenage son has forbidden me to give any of them away!

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